by Leigh Witchel
Despite the dull trope (Extreme Taylor! Is that Paul Taylor’s choreography combined with paintball?), the Paul Taylor Dance Company offered fine programming for the company’s season at The Joyce. The company’s post-pandemic strategy of more performances throughout the year in various theaters in New York City seems to be a good one. This program concentrated on core Taylor, earlier works done when the company was smaller. They were all good, almost all pieces we don’t see enough of, and even without live music, they all looked good on the smaller Joyce stage.
1969’s Private Domain opened the evening. Per Taylor’s biography of the same name, the germ of the piece was a sex-and-drug bender Taylor went through in Liverpool. He took a step back from extreme biography in the dance, producing a restrained and ambivalent is-it-porn-or-is-it-abstract? look at the Sexual Revolution.
The women wore bikinis in light, shiny green. The men walked about wearing nothing but dark briefs and shredded abs. In a cheap, simple, and effective masterstroke, a soft frame of flats at the proscenium created windows or doorways, but obscured segments of the stage at regular intervals. The peepholes made us voyeurs, as in Rear Window or one of the storefronts for prostitution in Amsterdam. At times it felt like an evening at a sex club drained of the actual sex.
The brass in Iannis Xenakis’ atonal Atrées slid and blared. This is hard music, not as hard as it once was, but a tautly paced performance still made it go by quickly. Kenny Corrigan entered and planted himself, rolling his pelvis without changing his expression. Shawn Lesniak swiveled and shimmied in his solo, twirling or jumping before vanishing momentarily. Because of the frame at the front, what you were able to see, the moments that were visible or obscured, depended on where you were sitting. The music scratched as the dancers rolled on their backs across the stage.
Lisa Borres and Maria Ambrose stood as if they dreamed last night they were posing onstage in their Maidenform bras before shuffling off. Lesniak backed out, tightly pumping his arms, then John Harnage raced onstage, leaping before creating a pile of the women. After being draped on him, Borres slinked forward into a clear space for a solo of poses that were part Botticelli, part Francis Bacon. Everyone crept on their backs to a clump, a idea that Taylor flipped on its belly and transformed six years later in Esplanade. Borres sat on the pile and disappeared into it.
The final image was part pose, part confrontation. The cast all walked forward to the apertures to stand looking at us. Lesniak put his hand on Ambrose’s left breast, and they all stood there like a group of people who don’t know one another, but in a moment could be naked. We haven’t seen Private Domain for a while, and it’s not a work that gets done frequently. It got a really good performance that made a case for keeping it around.
Calling Duet and Airs extreme in any way is extremely odd, unless you’re thinking they’re extremely mellow. Like 1962’s Aureole, both works show Taylor taking a genre of dance, and even more, the mood of courtliness that had been the province of ballet and claiming it for modern dance.
From 1964, Duet, listed in Taylor’s online catalog of works as Haydn Duet, is performed in multi-colored almost-pop-art tights (credited to Taylor’s alter ego, George Tacet, PhD). The short piece looked very Sixties, and with its embraces, grave walks and poses, felt like a coda to Aureole.
Maria Ambrose’s stork-like elegance contrasted with Devon Louis’ raw weight and force. He walked with Ambrose clasped to his back and lifted her to him, to close with her leg resting on his thigh. Duet is a good piece for Louis. He’s a strong partner, so he looked good with Ambrose, plus the slow work gave him a place to concentrate on line and polish.
Airs, from 1978, was the only piece we had seen recently. It was done at New York City Center right after the pandemic but the company was in a temporary dip after an enforced hiatus and everything looked better here.
Though the cast contains four women and three men, Taylor usually opted for symmetry in composition, three couples or two pairs of women, here with Jessica Ferretti, a tall, lush dancer, usually working solo. He asked for a lot; Madelyn Ho and Alex Clayton did a lovely but arduous duet where she stood braced on Clayton’s thighs twice before a finale at a brisk tempo to a final walk with the full cast offering its benediction to us.
Though Airs was made for the company, it was reconstructed on American Ballet Theatre in 1981, and it was a natural candidate for the transfer. Perhaps even more than Aureole, this felt like Taylor’s “answer dance” to ballet’s classicism. Jennifer Tipton’s blue cyclorama set Airs out-of-doors, as if open air would transform the protocol and artifice of an indoor court into a Peaceable Kingdom.
It would have been easy to dance Airs generically, but the antic poses, springs and walks looked specific and particular. The performance looked coached, with a staccato feel and crisp musicality.
If any work could fall apart, it would be 1970’s Big Bertha. But it got a tight, disturbing performance from the entire cast, one that hit the roots of Taylor’s dark fantasy of a family propelled into depravity by a malevolent carnival automaton. The simple scene element and costumes by Alec Sutherland mined disturbingly layers of Americana: poodle skirts and carnival stands, American eagles and nickels.
Christina Lynch Markham saw Big Bertha as sentient and evil, with a voracious, hateful gaze, and created her with a pot of green eye shadow and Joan Crawford eyebrows. Lee Duveneck as the father, “Mr. B”, Kristin Draucker as the mother and Eran Bugge as the daughter, all vo-dee-oh-dohed around the stage to recordings of carnival organs. Things began to break down during My Blue Heaven, soon Bertha and her wand (which now has a faintly glowing LED tip) had them all doing box steps under her sway.
When Duveneck fed Bertha a second nickel, there was some kind of residue on Bertha that got passed to Duveneck’s hand. Later on it got passed from Duveneck to Draucker in the kind of transmission and contagion that is the center of several American nightmares.
Take Me Out to the Ball Game trundled on with no change in tone in the music, but on the stage, Duveneck grew depraved in a solo, grinding and finally attacking his daughter.
Draucker pulled off her skirt to expose a fire-red outfit below, and did an angry, bored and awkward stripper’s dance, with Markham staring balefully. Duveneck carried Bugge out with the front of her dress stained in blood. The moment was still horrible, perhaps even more transgressive the less inured we have become to sexual violence.
As she did to start, Markham swallowed her wand like a carnival sword-swallower, to the sound of grinding metal, then pulled it out again. She picked Duveneck up and wrapped his wife’s skirt around his shoulders, giving him a cape like hers. He was lost. They went back, to jaunty music, to her platform and moved together as she gave him a final, awful kiss.
A few years ago, Duveneck didn’t look as if he had this role in him. Now he’s believable, and his corn-fed good looks only made his succumbing more unnerving. Bertha was a strangely great role for Markham, and perhaps inappropriate, but an amazing role to go out on and should have been her final performance instead of the ensemble role in Runes.
Does every generation get to dream our nightmares anew? Big Bertha feels now even more like a dark American folk tale of what’s just underneath the surface, waiting to erupt. In both Private Domain and Big Bertha, the darkness below respectability was repressed desire. Going on half a century past the Sexual Revolution, would it still be that today, or is that the least of our problems?
“Extreme” falls in the realm of marketing and politics, and “Master of Light and Dark,” and its bipolar implications, is another marketing slogan that could be happily shelved for another decade. We’re better off at looking at the four wonderful examples we saw of Taylor’s great output as a continuum. As with every one of us, the edges and the middle are all the same man.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Private Domain, Duet, Airs, Big Bertha – Paul Taylor Dance Company
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
June 27, 2024
Cover: Lisa Borres and Shawn Lesniak in Private Domain. Photo © Ron Thiele.
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